Brewing in Beats: Heartbeat sample dashboards

Welcome to the weekly Brewing in Beats ! With this weekly series, we are keeping you up to date with all the changes in Beats, including the latest commits, releases and other learning resources.

Heartbeat dashboard for HTTP monitoring

With this PR, a new sample dashboard for HTTP monitoring is added to Heartbeat. It contains details like how many hosts are up and down and for each monitoring host, the duration, the time to resolve the DNS name, round trip time for TLS handshake, for HTTP requests, etc. Also, an HTTP duration heat-map is available when using a Kibana version greater than 5.2.0.

Filebeat: Apply close_timeout also when output is blocked

The close_timeout configuration option gives the harvester a predefined lifetime and stops reading a log file after the close_timeout period has elapsed. Currently close_timeout does not apply in case the output is blocked. This changes the behavior of close_timeout to also close a file handler when the output is blocked.

This is solving an important issue that we had in Filebeat where an output blocked for a long time could cause Filebeat to not release its file handlers and in turn block the operating system from freeing up the disk space of deleted files.